It's not nearly as snappy or campy as it should be-though its self-seriousness is its own kind of entertainment.

It's only sporadically amusing and it's certainly not original.

So it's apropos that Forby's biggest misstep is his thin and careful script that can't carry us away on the same winds of fate that would put a sovereign republic's future in the hands of such a young woman.

Surrogate fathers and family values are at the foreground, making the film a quick sell to parents - especially as it boasts the added value of literary roots.

This charmer about late middle-aged renaissance is pertinent for these times and a perfect summer comedy for grown-ups looking to escape robots and superheroes.

What to expect from What to Expect When You're Expecting: laughs, heart and a terrific ensemble of actors doing what they do best.

Its endless parade of explosions, battles and general mayhem makes Michael Bay seem like Ingmar Bergman in comparison with Battleship director Peter Berg.

An uncomfortably honest portrait of a slow mental breakdown in self-consciously bohemian, twentysomething Brooklyn, Ry Russo-Young's You Wont Miss Me is so earnest the title's missing an apostrophe.

As divisive as his documentary "Kurt and Courtney," this made-for-British-TV doc by Nick Broomfield begins with the promise of neutrality - but it's a promise the film can't keep.

Lucky has its moments, but even with good, sometimes exceptional performances, its criminally vile characters are never likable enough to make you laugh at (or forgive) their wickedness.

More so than his other documentaries, Nygard remains in the spotlight from start to finish as he traveled across the globe to seek answers from various religious leaders. It's one thing to fail as a doc showman but by the film's end you feel like you have no answers to any of his questions.

Fun for every member of the family, despite marketing that suggests it may be intended for only the youngest of the bunch.

In an era where monster mythology has become raw material for all sorts of mediocrity, Priest is one of the best examples of a broad-scale vampire blockbuster.

Paranormal Activity 4 may mean more of the same, but in a modern horror landscape too often made up of equal parts of gore and boredom and resigned straight-to-video, it's a chiller designed to be seen in a crowded theater, and that alone makes it superior to its peers.

Shows remarkable access to military materials and personnel but, as a film, is unremarkable every other way.

Odd but endearing, The Good Heart has just exactly that--a good heart--mixed with a simplistic story that comes recommended as a showcase for two fine actors at the top of their game.

Like James in the ring, it doesn't pack a lot of power, but it comes out swinging and sweats for applause.

If you're a fan of upper-crust New England intellectuals or one of them yourself, Ceremony is probably your perfect movie.

A visually rough retreading of Superbad territory with a slightly more treacherous journey, The Virginity Hit has a surprisingly softer ethical edge than you'd expect.

A shrewdly understated satire of feel-good dramas disguised as gross-out inside jokes, Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie should alternately leave some viewers in stitches while making others quickly leave the theater.

For those looking for the rare romantic youth drama without vampyric overtones or other gimmicks, Remember Me should satisfy and it works as a much-needed change of pace for the talented Pattinson who remains one of the most watchable of our young stars.

There's nothing wrong with social message melodramas that tackle the AIDS crisis and certainly not every gay release has to please crowds like "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert," but Schlim has a good-time movie with a likable cast.

A kind of Ealing Comedy throwback that is arguably her best film since Beckham.

Clichés and thin thrillers are what we can expect from January releases and while Man on a Ledge has predictability to spare, it also has something that makes your time spent worthwhile: legitimate suspense.

With a razor-sharp script and Jennifer Garner winning laughs in a nice change-of-pace role, this cynically funny and pointedly pertinent not-so-subtle spin on the national battle between right and left wing politics scores lots of comic bullseyes.

Funnier, sharper and sweeter than expected.

The film, released in both 2D and 3D, delivers lots of freshly minted CGI'd action (eventually) but none of it grabs you. There's just something too synthetic about the whole enterprise - it's fantasy tipped over into fakery.

Despite all the boobs, The Change-Up is very fair to its female characters-well, at least to Mann and Wilde, who both ring true, even if Wilde is almost too good to be true...It sounds like a trifling detail, but those details are sorely missing from most "date movies," in which even the women laughing in the audience exit feeling like they're the butt of the joke.

Full of high flying action, nifty monsters, valiant heroes, plotting villains and impressive CGI.

Rogen isn't the obvious choice for a comic book icon but he forces his personality onto this material with an ingratiating ease.

The script, from first time screenwriters Ian Deitchman and Kristin Rusk Robinson, takes a predictable premise and gives it surprising depth.

If it's true that movies can transport you to places you could hardly have imagined, then Resident Evil: Retribution is the cinema's ultimate passport to purgatory.

The Sitter clocks in at a slim 81 minutes, but it feels significantly longer, as there is almost no fluidity between scenes, with the entire outing feeling slapped together at the last minute.

Trapped inside the German film Vincent Wants to Sea there's an affecting father-son drama, an amusing road movie, a quirky romantic comedy and a non-patronizing take on mental illness. What we actually get - a homogenized movie-of-the-week set against the Alps and punctuated by anodyne English-language pop songs - brought out the cynic in me.

Kate Beckinsale can still fill out a skin-tight leather bodysuit, but with Awakening, the vampires-vs-werewolves Underworld franchise has finally decayed beyond the point of repair.

From Prada to Nada might appeal to tweens but word of mouth won't be nearly as strong as Austen's parlor gossip.

The emotions are flat, predictable and forced when they ought to be romantic.

It’d all be pretty ho-hum weren’t it for some decent chemistry between the leads and the effortless presence of Regina King and Forest Whitaker.

The Rite might have been more affecting if the performances gave just a hint that its histrionics were more than just that.

Typically, Carpenter thrives on modestly budgeted films like The Ward, but this one comes off as an amateurish misstep due to unoriginal storytelling from fledgling screenwriters Michael and Shawn Rasmussen.

It's pithy and funny in that continuous smile kind of way that you don't notice until you're half way through it.

With bubbles of nascent arousal frothing at the film's feminine surface, Moth Diaries' commercial potential is likely to hinge on whether or not audiences can stand to be confronted with the confusion they felt as adolescents.

Director Douglas McGrath's empathy rescues it from the brink of disaster porn - it's so good-hearted and optimistic that a swath of stressed out moms will feel the flick speaks directly to them, which it does.

Shadyac spins cooperation in a different direction. I Am takes the sharing instinct as proof that all living beings are interconnected.

The Words is a movie for people who buy their novels at Starbucks, made by people who write their novels at Starbucks.

Too introverted and gimmicky for its own good.

It's never boring but the relentless twists do get a bit tedious.

Jovovich is on cruise control here and she fails to bring any kind of new life to a character that has been very good to her.

This ho-hum offshoot of Megan McDonald's book series earns negative "thrill points" as it chronicles the mirthless backyard shenanigans of a suburban Pippi Longstocking.

A throwback to classic movies like Charade and North by Northwest where beautiful, sophisticated people answer life-threatening danger with bon mots and ingenuity.

There's nothing more irritating than a piece that strains to be kooky and eccentric, yet one reason The Living Wake ultimately gets to you is that O'Connell is not trying too hard.

Wrath of the Titans delivers blockbuster bluster with single-minded blandness.

A squishy Hallmark Channel-level melodrama that rarely bothers to mask its propagandistic intentions.

The surprises really do surprise but often because they're remarkably stupid and poorly explained.

Far more charming, quick-witted and high spirited than anyone could have expected...for a film that didn't screen for press. It's gimmicky up the wazoo (not just 3D, but scratch-and-sniff "Aroma-Scope" cards handed out at screenings) and it's all the better for it.

It becomes a parade of interpersonal conflict and miserable circumstances that adds up to nothing less than angst-porn.

Fun Size isn't good enough to ascend to those John Hughesian ranks, and its small holiday window means it won't scarf much box office. But at least first time feature director Josh Schwartz can expect a minor slumber party hit on DVD.

Love Ranch proves to be a provocative, highly entertaining and surprisingly touching peek into a unique world movies don't often explore.

The movie's true horror isn't the murderous extraterrestrials, but the lame script.

Too silly to be confusing and too flaccid to reach potboiler status, the convoluted spy-thriller The Double is a tossed-off theatrical release that lands with a resounding thud.

The result is an odd, very personal film that the pop star-turned-director has made with tender loving care, but the results of the final final film are mixed.

Neeson’s austere, meticulous turn is the best reason to see After.Life. He’s cinema’s most soft-spoken, high-toned boogeyman since Anthony Hopkins opened his first can of fava beans.

Strictly for 6 year olds, this uninspired, one-joke comedy is full of too many misfired gags and weak comic setups to cross over to anyone whose head reaches above the seat back.

This Arthur feels flat and lifeless, especially when compared to its highly successful predecessor.

A formula picture made by someone who doesn't even believe in the formula - he knows it all has to work out, we know it all has to work out, and he can't even muster an ironic wink for our trouble.

Gone starts off as a character study about a woman struggling to regain control of her world in the wake of a horribly intrusive event, but that sort of thing doesn't make for a fun night at the movies, so it quickly concedes to a Hitchcockian "wrong woman" riff, in which sexually motivated abduction serves as the worst MacGuffin in movie history.

The bigger problem is that the action literally bleeds together and there's no sense of pacing.

As broad as a barn yet as thin as paper, The Watch is a summertime action-comedy that works almost in spite of its overcrowded cast and loose, pulpy spitball of a plot.

Parents with restless, animal-loving children may as well throw it a bone.

While Caruso will fail to win over adult reviewers, I Am Number Four will connect with teen moviegoers anxious for a new young adult fantasy fix to hold them until the next "Twilight Saga" hits in November.

The film is terrific: smart, sexy and funny.

The film's length and muddled message will likely keep it from reaching much of an audience, even within the presumed Latino faith-based target.

The real problem is, when the film blindsides us with a mystery we didn't know existed, we're already too busy not caring about mystery we knew was there.

In this case, boredom is the deadliest sin.

Channing doesn't bring any new tricks to the table but with her character's tenacious and spirited nature she's fun to have around for a few brief scenes.

So Watching TV is less a story loosely bound by cause and effect than a kind of scrapbook of memories, all of which convey the concerns of being super smart and mostly confused in a culturally mixed Manhattan, circa 1980. The affection is sweet and precise, if even the terms we use to define them aren't.

Robert Young's Eichmann feels the burden of history so heavily that it's effectively smothered by it.

The basic feeling you get out of this version is ‘been there-done that.’

Some audience members will come out for What's Your Number? for Faris' appeal and likability, but they'll leave disappointed because this film is more interested in showing her physical assets than her comedic ones.

Even the presence of Dan Aykroyd as Yogi and Justin Timberlake as his pint-sized straight man Boo Boo, couldn't save the movie.

Trash-action director Paul W.S. Anderson's (Alien vs. Predator) finds no cultural purpose for this rather literal adaptation of the Musketeers, but it's not so horrible it deserved to be protected from the cold eye of film critics.

Although it’s formulaic in the extreme, The Back-up Plan is an easygoing romantic comedy treat for fans of Jennifer Lopez.

So it's a half-certainty, half-shock that Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is both good and bad, a sequel that's hungry for thrills but bereft of the cohesiveness - and budget - to be a full meal.

As tales of troubled families go, it may have aspirations to be like "Ordinary People," but it falls way short.

Before The Ledge descends into third act melodrama, there are enough intriguing moments to make the viewer sense the better film this one wanted to be. A real shame that one didn't make it to the screen.

A classic case of being too much of a not-very-good thing.

This NYC-stamped film may claim street cred because it set-up shop along No Man’s Land, Brooklyn, late at night, but its drowsy work and parlor tricks suck the life out of what’s supposed to be a sleepless city.

Conceptualized and re-conceptualized, written and re-written, shot and re-shot, cut and re-cut, the final product is the world's longest short film.

The compellingly awful thriller, In My Sleep--in which Melrose Place meets imitation Hitchcock--is so unselfconsciously derivative that you have to admire it…or, if you don’t admire the movie itself, than admire the jejune chutzpah of writer-director-producer Allen Wolf.

Programming the Nation is a lo-fi, issues-driven documentary carried along by the strength of its ideas rather than its artless desktop aesthetic.

A movie that ought to entice people to want to travel with Gulliver instead inveigles them to run from him.

Tackling his own original screenplay, Zack Snyder keeps his reputation for outlandish visuals intact but strikes out as a storyteller.

From its baldly overwritten dialogue to its claustrophobically stingy use of locations, Dragons is underdone in every way.

Yet another movie marketed with the line “From the author of The Notebook,” The Last Song is distinguished from other Nicholas Sparks adaptations because it’s the first screenplay the best-selling novelist has written himself.

Even when presenting itself as a goofy trifle, the film never gels to that minimal standard.

The positives have an edge over the negatives, but it probably doesn't matter either way. It is an Adam Sandler movie.

More of a stunt than a script, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) should get a modest amount of I-dare-you ticket sales, but it's about as mass market as a dogfight.

Inside the dreadful action comedy Cat Run, there are about three terrible action comedies struggling to get out.